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Art Markman is a pretty smart dude; I’ve come across his writing/work/research a couple of times before. He seems to be a professor of psychology and marketing (you would think there are more academics that do those two fields, but there really aren’t) at UT-Austin. Here’s a thing he wrote for Fast Company on, basically, almost encouraging dissent within your ranks. “The Power of Naysayers,” etc, etc. Here’s the essential point:
There is a real danger with working in a group made up of people who largely agree with each other. Research demonstrates that when you communicate with other people, you come to think more similarly to them, because in order to understand what they are saying, you have to think like they do. Even if you ultimately disagree with the conclusions they draw, you exit the conversation thinking more similarly to them than you did before.
This has terrifying implications for most white-collar organizations, because a ton of senior management teams tend to be like this. They spend all their time together meeting with each other and sure, people have pet projects that they defend and others they strike down — and there are politics so that CMO and CTO aren’t aligned or whatever, but by and large this is a common American top-managers style: spend a lot of time together, talk about issues, silo those issues from the rank-and-file. I…
